The first book in the Camelot Code series, The Once and Future Geek , mixed time travel between the medieval world of King Arthur and our own, and it is a very entertaining book. The second book in the series, Geeks and Holy Grail (Hyperion, October 2019), is also entertaining (though not quite as funny; King Arthur as a modern day high school student is hard to beat....). When Morgana, sworn enemy of King Arthur, attacks the druids of Avalon, Nimue, the youngest of them, takes the Holy Grail and runs with it. King Arthur is dying, and only the Grail can save him. Desperate to keep it from falling into Morgana's hands, she stumbles into Merlin's Crystal Cave. But instead of Merlin there to help her (he's on vacation in Los Vegas, in our time), there's only his very inexperienced apprentice, Emrys. His attempt to hide the grail works, in a sense--as a small, flatulent dragon, it sure doesn't look much like a grail. But it isn't much use to Arthur as a...
Day produced an earlier encyclopedia, Tolkien: the Illustrated Encyclopedia, back in 1991. However, the focus of this particular effort sets it apart. It is not meant as a guide just to the people, places, and events of Tolkien's world, but as a guide to the bits of history and legend that (maybe) Tolkien had in mind (unconsciously or not) when he created them. (Day tends to ignore the "maybe" part of this, laying things out for readers to accept at face value). In his introduction, Day discusses Tolkien's metaphor for how stories are born from a "Pot of Soup" to which new bits are always being added. Essentially, this book is a collection of bits from a soup of European history and mythology that Day has fished out and linked to Tolkien's mythos.
Sometimes Day is successful in this, making credible links between Tolkien's fiction and historical and legendary events. An example is the comparison between Tolkien's Battle of the Field of Celebrant and a quote describing the real world fifth century battle of the Catalaunian Plains, one which had never occurred to me. I also enjoyed Day's etymological exploration of the name "Bilbo Baggins," and I could give many more examples of Day's interesting links between real world and Tolkien world story. Unfortunately, in other instances Day seems to be trying too hard to make connections where none necessarily exist, or pushes his connections too far--for instance, his effort to link Beowulf and Beorn fell flat for me, and some entries, like those for "brownies" and "Puck," are so tenuously tied to hobbits that they seem almost like padding. So it's a mixed bag, but one that was often fascinating reading.
Of course it's impossible for one book to contain everything. But there's a lot more to Anglo-Saxon literature than Beowulf, and I wish Day had included more of it. And I wish Day had pushed harder at the negative portrayal of the Easterlings, and the historical context beyond the "Barbarian Hordes from Asia" that went into forming Tolkien's derogatory attitude toward non-Westerners.
Still, the fun of seeing connections (and questioning them, and even fact-checking them) makes this a book many fans of Tolkien will enjoy. The inclusion of brief retellings of three primary legends that served as sources for Tolkien’s creations—the Volsunga saga, the Nibelungenlied, and Richard Wagner’s Ring Cycle add educational value. There are also about 200 black and white pictures, of varying quality, mostly by men, that serve primarily to show how vividly real Tolkien's world can become to its readers.
In conclusion--a great gift for a young fan in particular, but not necessarily great for readers who are already familiar with a lot of Tolkien's source material, or those who are themselves trained in academia, which calls for stronger arguments than some that Day makes. That being said, the point of the book, that these sorts of connections exist and can be explored, may well open wide joyful windows for many readers. I myself wrote my college application essay* on how the Lord of the Rings inspired in me an interest in archaeology and Early Medieval history, and this book would have been fuel to that fire.
*I got in. I don't have a copy, which is good, because probably it would make me squirm to read it.
disclaimer: review copy received from the publicist
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